


Observations

by chiiyo86



Category: Hikaru no Go
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:13:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22698430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Takei Masao likes the quiet of the Go salon he attends. The quiet doesn't last for long when Shindou Hikaru starts coming to play with Touya Akira.
Relationships: Shindou Hikaru/Touya Akira
Comments: 24
Kudos: 179
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Observations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [izayoi_no_mikoto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/izayoi_no_mikoto/gifts).



> This is a last minute treat but I hope you enjoy it! Hikaru/Akira is one of my forever OTPs but I'd never tried to write them before. :)

Takei Masao was a quiet man who led a quiet life. He worked as an accountant in a small accounting firm, and his passions were numbers, tending his garden and playing Go. He’d attended the same Go salon for almost five years and had found it an ideal place to play and learn in a tranquil atmosphere. Or at least it _had been_ tranquil, until Shindou Hikaru started visiting. 

Shindou himself was a loud, rambunctious boy who tended to speak a little too loudly for Masao’s taste, but the most startling thing about him was the effect he had on young master Touya. Masao would always remember the first time Shindou had come—or rather, the first time that Masao could remember him coming, as Ms. Ichikawa told him later that Shindou had been at the salon at least once before, when he and the young master were eleven years old. He’d played a game against the young master and had won, which Masao found hard to believe. Not that he thought Ms. Ichikawa would lie to him, of course, but she must be remembering it wrong. 

Shindou walked into the salon one rainy Tuesday afternoon, and it was immediately obvious that the young master knew him.

“Shindou,” he said, the name sounding well-worn in his mouth, as though he’d said it many times before. “So you’ve come, after all.”

Masao might have favored numbers, but it didn’t mean that he couldn’t read people well. He was curious about Shindou, because he had thought that the young master didn’t have any friends his own age, and there was something arresting about the expression on the young master’s face as he looked at Shindou: Masao could read some surprise there, but also an instant readiness, as if the young master were preparing for a battle that had started the moment Shindou had passed the door. 

“Yeah,” Shindou said nonchalantly, blowing a breath at the insolent blond lock of hair that fell in his eyes, the strap of his backpack hanging on one shoulder. “Thought you might like a game.”

“Of course. Have a seat.”

The young master’s tone was polite, but it wasn’t the mild politeness that Masao had seen him use until now. His voice was somber, his expression deadly serious. He hadn’t been playing with anyone when Shindou had entered, just reviewing an old game, but Masao had the feeling that even if he had, he would have discarded his opponent in favor of Shindou. 

When they started their game, Masao and a few other players naturally gathered around the boys’ table to watch them. It was rare for the young master to play games at the salon that weren’t meant to teach, so having the opportunity to watch him play freely was a treat. As the game progressed from Fuseki to middle game, Masao only followed enough of it that he could tell that this Shindou kid, like the young master, was playing at a level that flew way over his head. He was struck by how fiercely they played one another, having only ever known the gentle nudging of the young master’s teaching Go. Shindou, despite his casual attitude when he’d arrived, was intensely focused on the game and no words were exchanged between the players until the end.

Shindou lost by a few points, and Masao could feel the breath of relief shared by the group who had been watching the game—because for a moment, it had looked like Touya Akira might lose, and Masao knew that the notion the young master could lose to a kid his own age wasn’t only disturbing to him.

The real surprise came _after_ the game, as Shindou and the young master started to review it together. Masao had been looking forward to it, because you could learn a lot by listening to two players of this level commenting their games. It started off interesting, though a bit too technical for Masao sometimes, but then it went downhill fast. 

“What did you think, really, playing that move?” the young master said. “Did you think I’m so stupid that I wouldn’t see that you were trying to drag me into a Ko fight to save your corner?”

Masao blinked; he’d never heard the young master sound so biting before. Shindou instantly responded in kind.

“Stupid?” he exclaimed. “ _I_ ’m the one who’s stupid? If you want to talk about stupid, let’s review what you did a bit later.”

Everyone gasped at Shindou daring to call the young master stupid. In a few sharp _clack_ , the boy replayed the next moves, so fast that Masao could barely follow. Masao didn’t remember the game well enough to be able to tell for sure that they were the correct moves, but he assumed that the young master would have pointed out any mistake. 

“ _This_ ,” Shindou said, pointing a furious index at a stone on the northern side. “Explain this in a way that doesn’t sound totally idiotic.”

Eventually, the discussion descended into a screaming fight under the eyes of a stunned audience. It ended when Shindou left in a huff, kicking back his chair so hard it bumped into the table behind it. 

“What a brat!” Kishi Masamune said once he was gone. “How dare he speak to the young master that way! Calling him stupid, and acting like—”

“He was right,” the young master interrupted him. “It was a stupid move. I was too forceful.” His eyes drifted toward the exit that Shindou had passed a few moments ago. “He unsettled me.”

The quiet admission robbed everybody of their words. It took some time before all the players could go back to their own games and the previous serene atmosphere could be reinstated. Shindou might or might have not unsettled the young master, but his visit had certainly rushed through the salon like a storm and left just as much damage behind. The calm afterward had an ominous quality to it. 

Following this incident, the quiet salon became not so quiet when Shindou visited. They learned that Shindou was a beginner pro that the young master had known for a few years, although it didn’t look like the two were exactly friends. His visits always happened the same way: he and the young master would play one intense, ferocious game, which would be followed by an equally intense and ferocious fight when they tried to review it. Sometimes the fights were highly technical and held fascinating insights into the minds of pro players; other times, they were of a confounding immaturity.

“Do you really have to slam your stones that hard on the goban?” the young master shouted. “You’re going to chip them! Can’t you respect equipment that isn’t your own? Are you going to pay back the stones you damaged?”

“What, should I daintily put them on the board like you do? Wait, what am I saying—you slam them just as hard as me!”

“No, I don’t!”

“Yes, you do!”

“I don’t, stop saying nonsense!”

It could go on along those lines for a while. Most of the time, Shindou ended up making a stormy exit, but sometimes he found someone else to play with and stayed a little longer, pointedly ignoring the young master glaring daggers at his back the whole time. Whenever both of them were in the same room, even if they weren’t talking, the tension in the air was so electric that Masao found it a little suffocating. It wasn’t surprising, then, if the two young players were often front and center in the salon’s conversations. The patrons’ opinions varied on what to make of Shindou and the young master’s relationship. Some, like Kitajima Daisuke, were incensed on the young master’s behalf and thought that the Shindou boy should be taught a lesson—Masao was afraid that he might mean a beat-up, since no one at the salon was a good enough player to teach Shindou a lesson by playing a game with him, so he always tried to change the subject when Kitajima started to get worked up.

Strangely enough, the young master could never suffer hearing anyone bad-mouthing Shindou. “Shindou is a pro, same as I am,” he would say. “We’re equals, no matter what our rankings say. He’ll catch up to me soon enough.”

“I actually find it heartwarming,” Katsuragi Kioshi told Masao one day, as they were playing a game that Masao was badly losing. “The young master is much too serious for his age.”

“The young master’s maturity is impressive,” Masao said.

“Sure, and I won’t say I don’t appreciate a well-mannered boy,” Katsuragi said, “but I have two children who are only a little younger than the young master and they’re both pretty lively. You have all the time in the world to be serious later on. If you can’t be immature when you’re a teenager, then when can you be?”

Masao looked at the table where the young master sat on his own, laying stones on the goban, his expression as perfectly composed as it always was, except for when Shindou was there.

“I guess you might be right,” he said to Katsuragi. “Well, the least we can say is that things have gotten livelier around here since Shindou Hikaru started coming.”

Katsuragi let out a deep, full-bellied laugh, slapping his thigh. “Ha! That’s one way to put it, yes.”

After that conversation, Masao found himself paying more attention to the young master’s attitude when Shindou was there. He noticed the color on the boy’s cheeks, the sparks in his eyes. It sometimes seemed like there were two Touya Akiras—one for Shindou Hikaru and one for everyone else. But Masao thought that it might be more accurate to say that the Touya Akira who was all fire always lived inside the boy, only showing his face when Shindou brought him out. Masao found it a rather sad thought; a boy so young shouldn’t have learned already how to hide himself. 

The fights between Shindou and the young master became almost routine after a while. Ms. Ichikawa, who at first had tried to appease them when they started fighting, now just let them be. Even Masao, who disliked noise and found the shouting matches uncomfortable, eventually accepted them as an inevitable nuisance, like hailstorms and heat waves. Which was why it came as a surprise when on a bright late April afternoon, a visit from Shindou took place in perfect quiet. 

The quiet was a relief, so Masao didn’t think much of it at first, until Katsuragi leaned over the goban and whispered to him, “Look at Shindou and the young master. Does anything look weird to you?”

Masao had to twist around on his chair to look. He was surprised to see that the boys had finished their game and had started reviewing it—having heard no shouting, he’d assumed that they were still deeply engrossed in it. Shindou was murmuring inaudible comments to the young master, and his posture was slumped, his attitude curiously lifeless. As Masao watched, Shindou sighed, leaned back in his seat and dragged his hands down his face.

“I think I better just go,” he said, standing up. “Everything I do is crap today.”

“Shindou,” the young master called him back. 

Shindou turned expectantly to him, and the young master got up and grabbed him by the wrist. For a moment they looked at each other without a word, the young master’s fingers curled loosely around Shindou’s wrist, and if Masao couldn’t see the young master’s face he could see Shindou’s, as well as the series of emotions that flickered on it—annoyance, distress, and then a softening acceptance, as though he knew that the young master could see through him and was done resisting it.

“What,” he said tiredly. “We’ll play another game later, Touya.”

“I know. But just… take care of yourself, all right?”

The words were so low that Masao could only guess at them—maybe the young master had said something else entirely. Whatever it was, it triggered a snort of laughter from Shindou.

“You’re impossible,” he said to the young master. 

“ _You_ ’re impossible,” replied the young master, his fingers clasping Shindou’s wrist harder.

“Not getting into it today. See you later, Touya.”

“What do you make of this?” Katsuragi said as Shindou left and the young master sat back down, his expression troubled.

Masao wasn’t sure whether Katsuragi had overheard the conversation, and, with a confused sense that he’d listened to something that he shouldn’t have, he thought it might be better not to refer to it. 

“Shindou must be having an off day,” he said. “I, for one, appreciated the respite.”

“Listen to yourself,” Katsuragi said. “You’re talking like an old man.”

“I know I’m much too old to keep up with those youngsters. The pro world sounds like an exhausting place.”

Katsuragi seemed to agree with that assessment. They resumed their game, deciding that it was better for them to stay out of Touya Akira and Shindou Hikaru’s tangled relationship.


End file.
